This Friday at the Pallas Annex I’ll be screening one of my all-time favorite films, Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983). It feels nearly impossible to describe this achingly gorgeous experimental masterpiece except to say that it presents as a documentary about the vertigo of time and memory in a lyrically narrated, peripatetic journey that bounces back and forth between Tokyo, Bissau, San Francisco, Paris, and the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago.
This felt like the perfect film to bid a bittersweet farewell to Pallas and reconvene the vibrant community it has nurtured here in SF over the past six years. As David Lynch once said: “You die and you have a little time in a dream and, by golly, you come back.”
Friday, April 3, 7-9 pm
Pallas Annex
1117 Geary
RSVP required: [email protected]
BYOB but also BYOP (Bring Your Own Pillow): we will have rugs and a few cushions, but this is also closing night, so most of the furniture is already gone
@_p_a_l_l_a_s_
My deranged foray into cultural criticism, now available in print and online as a feature in the March 2026 issue of Artforum, explores Season 2 of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal, the latest Jurassic World franchise, and Kris Jenner’s deep-plane facelift (with detours into Barbra Streisand’s cloned dogs and Roman portraiture) in light of concerns about generative AI model collapse.
Huge thanks to Tina Rivers Ryan and Alex Jovanovich for some of the best editorial guidance in the business (or even academia, for that matter), and for publishing an essay a friend called “gay AF.”
Link to the online version in my bio.
@artforum@tinariversryan@nathanfielder@therehearsalhbo@barbrastreisand@jurassicworld@krisjenner #ai #philosophy #tech
The most metal show of the year is wax.
One can argue with some of the conclusions of this brainy little show at the Uffizi, but the objects themselves—damned souls burning in the flames of hell, decaying corpses, titillating dramas of the flesh—are like nothing else. Using Julius von Schlosser’s seminal essay “History of Portraiture in Wax” of 1910-1911 as a conceptual springboard, the show explores the instability of wax that wavers between liquidity and solidity, fragility and permanence, organic substance and lifeless matter. For Schlosser, it is the proclivity of wax to effects of realism that makes it seem “objective,” artless, and anathema to the very concept of style in its traditional art historical formulations.
Drawing explicitly on Aby Warburg’s concept of Nachleben, Schlosser’s “history” of wax portraiture is not a “natural history” that would identify points of artistic influence and reception that can be traced along a linear flow of time. Instead, it tracks the symptoms of culture, its survivals, in which the magic of resemblance emerges in what he called “a psychological rather than a historical evolution, a constraint aggravated by the fact that lines often intersect, mark time, or break off.”
For Georges Didi-Huberman, who beautifully chronicles the materiality of wax in the history of art, “the ‘incarnate power’ of wax does not only form a metaphor in the discourse of the great mythical authors. It is everyday ‘flesh’ for the believer—liturgical flesh.” It is precisely the allegorical possibilities of wax and its uncanny, excessive resemblance that troubles its status in a humanistic discipline. Hence the strict division between the anatomical studies of Leonardo da Vinci, safekept at the Uffizi, and the morbid curiosities of Gaetano Giulio Zumbo, quarantined in the natural history collection of the La Specola across the Arno. Now, at least for a time, you can see them together.
#wax #sculpture #anatomy #florence
God tier, mind-shattering, banger after banger moments of sculptural display in the Veneto (where they supposedly have some pretty okay paintings, too)
#veneto #sculpture #museum
Apport (1894-): the production of material objects, supposedly by occult means, at a spiritualistic séance.
Last week I examined dozens of some of the strangest objects in Special Collections at the Stanford Libraries. These “apports” ostensibly traveled through the astral plane across great distances of time and space until they appeared out of thin air at séance circles with the Stanford family. Following the death of her son Leland Stanford Jr. in 1884, Jane Stanford became grief stricken and, like many at the time, turned to Spiritualism in the hopes of making contact with the spirit of her beloved son.
Thomas Welton Stanford, the younger brother of Leland Stanford Sr., was a leading spiritualist in Australia and played a major role in introducing Jane Stanford to the movement when he came to California. He continued to engage in séances after her death. Among the preserved objects from these activities are numerous slates on which the medium Fred Evans transcribed messages from Jane and Leland Stanford Jr. from beyond the grave; papyrus fragments supposedly containing fragments of lost discourses of ancient philosophers; corn husks, seeds, and shark’s teeth; and even a whole tortoise whose shell is all that remains.
By the 1920s, apport frauds were revealed by the likes of Harry Houdini. According to Wikipedia, “Some female mediums went so far as to conceal in their vagina or anus objects to be ‘apported’ during the seance and gauzy fabric that would become ‘ectoplasm’ during the seance. These were places that Victorian gentlemen, no matter how skeptical, were highly unlikely to ask to search.”
#spiritualism #occult #seance #archive #stanford #ghost
Gen Z Aesthetic Theory, Vol. 1
The thrill of holding a Greek drinking cup in your bare hands—the mesoperceptual frisson of gliding your finger along its smooth and lustrous surface—is deeply and fetishistically satisfying. Less satisfying, perhaps, is the connoisseur’s desire for plenitude in the attribution of authorship, with Sir John Davidson Beazley’s pioneering scholarship on Greek vase painting offering a prime example. A close friend and colleague’s encounter with a Gen Z student’s attempts to register these formal characteristics reveals a keen intuition about the limitations of this fraught yet crucial enterprise—one where meaning is perpetually deferred by the “givenness” of the object.
#archaeology #art #ceramic #genz #vibes
Next week at the Pallas Annex I’ll be screening LA CHIMERA (2023), a film directed by Alice Rohrwacher, starring Josh O’Connor, Carol Duarte, Vincenzo Nemolato, Alba Rohrwacher, and Isabella Rossellini.
Set in the 1980s, the film follows Arthur, a British archaeologist-turned-tombarolo (tomb robber) who divines the locations of Etruscan tombs with stirring visions and a trusty dowsing rod. Caught between a romantic interest and a ragtag group of fellow tombaroli, Arthur must choose between his past and the promise of the future.
Friday, August 1, 8-10:30 pm
Pallas Annex
1117 Geary
RSVP required: [email protected]
Beer and wine provided with a suggested donation of $10 at the door.
@_p_a_l_l_a_s_
I wrote an essay for my favorite occult technician, @mattcopson , whose first monograph “Sob Story” was recently co-published by @curamagazine and @kwinstitutefcontemporaryart on the occasion of his major solo exhibition. Baby-operated magic lanterns, cranial anamorphosis, articulated skeletons, comic foregrounds, moody dioramas, color-changing glass—it’s all there, right out in the open, like a rabbit pulled from the proverbial hat
Next week at the @_p_a_l_l_a_s_ Annex, I will be screening THE BELLY OF AN ARCHITECT (1987), a film directed by Peter Greenaway, starring Brian Dennehy, Chloe Webb, and Lambert Wilson, featuring a score by Wim Mertens.
“Chicago…home of some of the best carnivorous architecture in the Western world—that is, outside of Rome.”
The film tracks the American architect Stourley Kracklite as he travels to Rome with his wife Louisa to mount an exhibition on the French neoclassical architect Étienne-Louis Boullé, whose visionary designs shuttle between the ancient past and the contemporary present. As Kracklite begins to suffer from severe abdominal pains that command his increasingly obsessive attention, he gradually falls out with his pregnant wife, who begins to have an affair with the younger co-organizer of the exhibition, and withdraws from his professional commitments. Boullé’s spherical and often unrealized designs, perhaps most famously in his cenotaph for Isaac Newton, provide a formal link between the belly of the architect and his wife as a site of both creative conception and frustrated desire.
Friday, June 13, 8:30-10:30 pm
Pallas Annex
1117 Geary
RSVP required: [email protected]
Maximum capacity: 25
BYOB
If you are able, please consider supporting this vital space for the SF arts community with a suggested donation of $10
#movie #cinema #rome #architecture #art
Still pinching myself after gaining access to Charles-Louis Clérisseau’s “Ruin Room” in the convent of S. Trinità dei Monti in Rome. Commissioned in 1766, the room conjures the uncanny feeling of a space outside of time where past and future tumble into the present. Clérisseau’s fantasy presents an ancient temple fallen into disrepair, creating the ideal refuge for a hermit: a Roman sarcophagus rests above a fireplace where a dog has curled up for a nap; a crumbling coffered ceiling offers fictive views of rotten rafters and a bucolic landscape; a colorful parrot rests on an exposed timber beam whose underlying plaster extends into real space; and a real niche contains an illusory bookshelf with volumes on mathematics.
The commission was a perfect choice for the Order of the Minims who were committed to Franciscan virtues of humility and were already patrons of projects related to mathematics such as the anamorphic frescos of Emmanuel Maignan and Jean-François Niceron. But unlike anamorphosis that depends on a privileged standpoint to rectify a distorted image, Clérisseau’s trompe l’oeil envelops you in its fictive image space so thoroughly that you don’t fully register it as an illusion at first glance, even in the extended duration of slow looking. A 2016 study using digital photogrammetry created a textured polygonal model from a point cloud by weaving together metric and colorimetric data through techniques of projective geometry and calculation algorithms.
This model clarifies the mathematics behind the painting’s conception. But one could also see the point cloud as a different composite form tending towards entropy. Writing on Clérisseau and ruins more generally, Susan Stewart writes that ruins are the material equivalent of a non sequitur: “They do not follow or precede—they call for the supplement of further reading, further syntax.” Standing in the syntactically jumbled, immersive space of the room, one senses not that it extends to infinity, but rather that it encloses its visitors in a complex polyhedron through the ceaseless operations of folding, unfolding, and refolding space.
#art #artoftheday #painting #illusion #rome #architecture #ruins
